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The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga

HarperCollins

Rs. 395

God knows why this got the Booker. Actually, I guess it’s quite apparent - India is one of the world’s largest book-buying markets and Adiga’s claim that “At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society,” with its promise of a look at a ‘real’ India must be enticing.

If you like this business of seeing underneath India’s skin of entrepreneurial success and the shine of progress, you might be able to give “The White Tiger” a fair reading. I don’t have the stomach for it myself, for example something like this - “ And then I understood: this was the real god of Benaras - this black mud of the Ganga into which everything died, and decomposed, and was reborn from, and died into again. The same would happen to me when I died and they brought me here. Nothing would get liberated here” is just bad writing as far I can see. It’s as bad as telling readers that our snake charmers and Great Indian Rope tricksters are con men, our elephants are ill-treated and our holy places murky. Sensible people don’t use these in main narratives, perhaps not even in annotations.

I do not like “The White Tiger”, and not only because of my disappointment that the Ganga actually doesn’t liberate.

Dreams for the Dying

C.K. Meena

Dronequill

Rs. 250

This murder mystery by Bangalore-based C.K.Meena is intriguing in more ways than one: while the plot will have you on the edge of the page, you’ll also be constantly surprised that the tension and the momentum of the story come less from the ev ents of the plot and more from the motives of the characters.

“Dreams for the Dying” is C.K. Meena’s second novel, and though very different from the first one in terms of genre and structure, it confirms what the first one made you suspect – that this writer’s strength is her characters, each of who is a little world of her/his own.

As readers, we should be grateful for writers like C.K. Meena, who craft their writing with enough attention given to structure, language and style so that it works for the reader as well, because now is the time of the “dashed off” novel, which considers neither form nor content worth more than glancing attention.

You are here

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

Penguin

Rs. 199

I find it a real pain to review books like “You Are Here”; the author is young, it’s a first book, and you’d like to say “Looking forward to more from this writer”, but the book is so unforgivably boring , it puts the milk of human kindness to sleep. And so, this is a bad book, a boring book. But maybe the writer will improve with age. And it’s not only me – wondering if I was bored because I was old - I gave the book to a Young Person, who said “This is as bad as Manjula Padhmanabhan’s Getting There, and Advaita Kala’s Almost Famous, only more blah.” Perhaps I should have asked someone with less brains and more free time.

The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction

Translated by Pritam Chakravarthy

Blaft Publications

Rs. 395

When this appears, the second Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction is scheduled to release in early 2009; Blaft is an interesting publisher, and this collection is interesting. Selected and translated with feeling, by Pritam Chakravarthy, these stor ies were once serialised in magazines like “Anandha Vikatan”, “Kumudham”, “Dhinamani Kadhir”, “Thuglaq”, “Kalaimagal”, “Kalkandu” etc. This pulp is what large parts of the reading public – including people like Pritam herself, who were also reading in English – have been reading, rather than the “literature” collected in books. The collection brings to mind another time, another kind of life, life not networked by Internet, life before pulp was so easily available in books. There’s some interesting additional material: magazine covers and illustrations, blurbs, interviews with authors, ads for books etc. But - though I hate to admit it - at the end of the reading, there’s also a feeling of some little thing missing. I guess going from Tamil to English, a lot of juice goes also from the pulp, and then these stories were really meant to be read serialised and that act would have imbued them with an anticipation that’s missing here. However, this is an interesting collection, which I could not think of not owning a copy of. Looking forward to the next.

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